'Still-Slow-Divided' reviews 'Fractured Landscapes' reviews recent Rosemary Butcher reviews more Catherine Hale reviews?

In both works, the stage is split into two distinct hemispheres of action, aptly prefiguring, perhaps, an intellectualism that divides doing from feeling. In Fractured Landscapes, Fragmented Narratives the jerkily contemplative duet between Deborah Jones and Mark Lorimer all occurs downstage right while upstage left a video screen echoes moments of it in freeze frames. Their perfunctory tugging, leaning, and pulling at each other, is magnified into images of inadvertent resonance: hands clasped across a divide, or her heads locked into each others bodies like fighting bulls. In Still-Slow-Divided two large squares of light again create a diagonal symmetry, enclosures against which flinging, hurtling movements of the two pairs of dancers (Potter/Lorimer; Jones/Clayden) seem to reverberate.

However, the difference between the two works, made only four years apart, was striking. The 1998 Fractured Landscapes, the captivating video apart, is what one might term ‘interesting’. If it weren’t so assured in its minimalism it could be mistaken for a promising graduate debut exploring body mechanics a deux. Releasing and restraining, surrendering and bearing weight - Jones and Lorimer’s diligently repetitive performance is never deterred by a glance at each other, let alone at us. Occasionally, the sheer solemnity of the effort not to dance produces a stark beauty, like when Lorimer’s simple outstretched arms suggested the crucifixion. But if it was the equivalent of practising scales, Still-Slow-Divided (2002) is by contrast, a symphony.

The same analytical choreography, this time inspired from the practices of rock climbing and parachuting, acquires a dynamic intricacy that makes it thrilling. Limbs are floppy, muscles unflexed yet the momentum of each tiny bend, twist or step is so precisely calculated that the effect is an exhilarating urgency. The chain of movements seems compelled by a trigonometric logic that is not human. But this disharmony is not a random assembly of discrete elements, like Cunningham’s, but rather as though the body being is swept, shaken and chased by forces outside of it. Like the dance of a kite in the wind these dancers’ bodies seem to register the awesome chaos of the universe upon them. And without relinquishing any cerebrality their experience moves us deeply. That’s where Butcher’s genius lies. With passionate commitment like hers, the project of stripping dancerliness away from dance can still produce art.